911review/wtc

Engineer society accused of cover-ups

By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer Tue Mar 25, 4:48 PM ET

NEW ORLEANS - The professional organization for engineers who build the nation's roads, dams and bridges has been accused by fellow engineers of covering up catastrophic design flaws while investigating national disasters.
ADVERTISEMENT

After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the levee failures caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the federal government paid the American Society of Civil Engineers to investigate what went wrong.

Critics now accuse the group of covering up engineering mistakes, downplaying the need to alter building standards, and using the investigations to protect engineers and government agencies from lawsuits.

Similar accusations arose after both disasters, but the most recent allegations have pressured the organization to convene an independent panel to investigate.

"They want to make sure that they do things the right way and that they learn lessons from the studies they do," said Sherwood Boelhert, a retired Republican congressman from New York who heads the panel. He led the House Science Committee for six years.

The panel is expected to issue a report by the end of April and may recommend that the society stop taking money from government agencies for disaster investigations.

The engineering group says it takes the allegations seriously, but it has declined to comment until completion of the panel's report and an internal ethics review.

In the World Trade Center case, critics contend the engineering society wrongly concluded skyscrapers cannot withstand getting hit by airplanes. In the hurricane investigation, it was accused of suggesting that the power of the storm was as big a problem as the poorly designed levees.

The group has about 140,000 members and is based in Reston, Va. It sets engineering standards and codes and publishes technical books and a glossy magazine. Members testify regularly before Congress and issue an annual report on the state of the nation's public-works projects.

The society got a $1.1 million grant from the Army Corps of Engineers to study the levee failures. Similarly, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid the group about $257,000 to investigate the World Trade Center collapse.

The engineers were not involved in investigating last year's bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

The society issued a report last year that blamed the levee failures on poor design and the Corps' use of incorrect engineering data.

Raymond Seed, a levee expert at the University of California, Berkeley, was among the first to question the society's involvement. He was on a team funded by the National Science Foundation to study the New Orleans flood.

Seed accused the engineering society and the Army Corps of collusion, writing an Oct. 20 letter alleging that the two organizations worked together "to promulgate misleading studies and statements, to subvert appropriate independent investigations ... to literally attempt to change some of the critical apparent answers regarding lessons to be learned."

Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the corps' director of civil works, disputed Seed's allegations at a December meeting in New Orleans.

"He talks about the supposed cover-up," Riley said. "Well, our people live here in New Orleans ... We don't stand behind our work. We live behind our work."

In 2002, the society's report on the World Trade Center praised the buildings for remaining standing long enough to allow tens thousands of people to flee.

But, the report said, skyscrapers are not typically designed to withstand airplane impacts. Instead of hardening buildings against such impacts, it recommended improving aviation security and fire protection.

Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineer and forensics expert, contends his computer simulations disprove the society's findings that skyscrapers could not be designed to withstand the impact of a jetliner.

Astaneh-Asl, who received m

Why did the World Trade Centers create so much powdered concrete?

If you are looking for the physics problem:
How much energy was needed to crumble the buildings?

The World Trade Center buildings did not simply "fall down". Rather, both towers and building #7 crumbled into concrete powder and small pieces of steel. By evening lower Manhattan was covered with concrete powder up to several inches thick, as if a volcano has erupted nearby. Why all the powder? Why didn't the buildings just fall down or break into large pieces?

Our government conducted an investigation into the collapse of the buildings, but the magazine Fire Engineering is (as of Feb 2002) accusing the investigation of being "a half-baked farce". More about the half-baked farce: CrummyBuildings.html

Sure, the manner in which the WTC buildings collapsed looks just like a building being destroyed by explosives, but life is full of coincidences, as well as events beyond human understanding. We have to be careful not to find hidden meanings or conspiracies where none exist.

A good example is the field of astrology. Long ago our ancestors noticed the planets are moving and occasionally align in patterns. Some people assumed the movements of the planets must have significance to human life. Eventually their speculations developed into the field of astrology.

There are unexplained events in the World Trade Center attack. Some events may be coincidences, and some may be beyond our understanding simply because our knowledge of physics is not complete.

If we are not careful we could create the field of "World Trade Center-ology" in which we find hidden meanings in what were actually meaningless events.

At the other extreme, we would be foolish to dismiss unexplained events simply because we don't want to face the possibility that the WTC attack is an incredible scam; we would be foolish to ignore the firemen who tell us the official investigation is a half-baked farce.

On the Google "Politics" message board is a person named "Geeman" who often complains about unexplained issues and possible scams. Eventually his frequent postings got through to me and I decided to look more closely at the photographs of the attack and seriously consider the scam possibility (Geeman's web site can be found by clicking here.)

This document gives my analysis of these unexplained events. I will start with an overview of the events.

A video of the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center shows the perfect controlled demolition of WTC 7 . WTC 7 was 2 blocks away from WTC1/2, and was only superficially hit by debris when 1 and 2 collapsed as you can readily see from the starting point of the video. At 5:22 p.m., over six hours after WTC 1 and 2 "collapsed", WTC 7 came down in a free fall.
The Official Story in the press is that diesel fuel reservoirs for backup power generators at Guilliani's Emergency Command Center in the building exploded and brought the resulting fire brought the building down, even though there has never been a case on record of fire-induced collapse of large fire-protected steel buildings, and that there were only sept 11th very small fires in progress when the building "collapsed." Not to mention that, as any one with the slightest technical background knows, diesel at normal pressure is non-explosive and barely flammable. (!) See our pages Muslims Suspend Physics.
According to the House so-called investigation:

Loss of structural integrity was likely a result of weakening caused by fires on the 5th to 7th floors. The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analysis are needed to resolve this issue.

The strange Collapse of the Spire World Trade Center 9/11

From the page: "The Flying Elephant: Evidence for Involvement of a Third Jet in the WTC Attacks

No mention of a large, commercial-class aircraft loitering in the restricted airspace of lower
Manhattan during the strikes on the WTC towers will be found in the 9/11 Commission Report.
It does not appear in any version of the Official Story. It is largely unknown even in critical
studies of 9/11. Yet substantial evidence exists to support its presence coincident with the
attacks, actually orbiting in close proximity to the towers for several minutes while the North
Tower burned and the South Tower was struck. Photography, video footage and eyewitness
accounts, including FDNY transcripts and mainstream media audio, confirm this fact.

Why is this significant? Let us consider the commercial air traffic on a typical Tuesday morning
over New York City. There are three major airports servicing the city: La Guardia and JFK
International to the east, and Newark International across the Hudson to the west. Normal
holding patterns for these airports do not intersect the borough of Manhattan at any point. Lower
Manhattan is, and was on the morning of 9/11/01, a low-altitude flight-restricted (no fly) zone
for commercial jets, as designated by the FAA, for the obvious reason that heavy, fast-moving
aircraft and tall buildings pose mutual hazards. Air traffic near the WTC towers was doubly
restricted, with a minimum ceiling extending two thousand feet above the towers (3,300 feet)
within a radius of one nautical mile, excepting only police aviation without special permit. These
were the VFR (visual flight rules) parameters in effect on the morning of 9/11. Once WTC1 was
hit, the black smoke plume expanding southeast from the tower would pose an additional threat
to navigation."

From the page: "Dear Mr. Olbermann:

I continue to be stunned by your personal bravery, to quite literally "risk it all"
to advance the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

movies.crooksandliars.com/CountDown-SpecialComment [movies.crooksandliars.com/CountDown-SpecialComment] - Bush-911....

Please reveal the links between Dresser, Haliburton, Cheney and Asbestos,
specificically the asbestos that was in the WTC. Haliburton, under Cheney's
leadership, acquired Dresser, and in so doing, Dresser's Asbestos Liability.

ASBESTOS AT GROUND ZERO? WOW, WHAT A COINCIDENCE!

THE WTC WAS THE SINGLE LARGEST ASBESTOS LIABILITY IN THE COUNTRY?

WHAT WOULD THE DEMO COST HAVE BEEN TO DISMANTLE THE TOWERS
IN ANY OTHER WAY - GIVEN THAT THEY WERE FULL OF ASBESTOS?"